Affiliate networks carry the advantage of a huge range of merchants and a unified management and payment interface. If you want the greatest possible selection of merchants, and reliable third-party tracking and reporting, the large networks are hard to beat.
What are the Big Affiliate Networks?
Unlike programs that are specific to an individual merchant, the affiliate networks attract hundreds of different merchants, offering centralized tracking, reporting and administration. What this means from the standpoint of the affiliate is that by signing up to just one network, you can immediately gain access to hundreds of different affiliate marketing opportunities.
What are the Advantages of Affiliate Networks?
For the affiliate, working with a network means access to a large selection of merchants, and a unified interface for working with each: all the click and sales statistic, plus linking information, payment details, banners, and datafeeds (if available) are together in one place, on one website. Some networks even consolidate payments from merchants to affiliates, so that rather than handling dozens of paper checks or wire transfers every month, you have just one payment.
What are the Disadvantages of Affiliate Networks?
Two disadvantages of affiliate networks are:
- Few, if any, multi-tier opportunities, and
- All links/traffic go through the affiliate network's servers.
The first is a disadvantage only if you are interested in recruiting other affiliates, while the second impacts everyone.
Why should it matter if links point to the affiliate network's servers? It matters for two reasons.
The first is that links to the affiliate network servers are essentially irrelevant to search engine spiders: they will be treated as irrelevant links, rather than links to content relevant to your own page content, and you will have very little hope of getting a network link to appear directly in a SERP (search engine results page). (With individual merchant programs, it can happen that a link to a merchant page -- with an affiliate link embedded -- can achieve higher SERP placement than any of the affiliate pages which link to it. Major search engines have taken steps to reduce the chances of this happening with affiliate network links.)
The second is that because the affiliate network servers are so well-known, links to them can be targeted both by scumware and by legitimate ad-stripping software. In other words, links to affiliate networks are more vulnerable both to hijacking by malicious scumware (which intercepts user attempts to click through the links and redirects them to a new URL) and to complete removal by ad-stripping software.
What Affiliate Networks are Available?
All of the following affiliate networks have maintained solid reputations in the affiliate community for several years, and we can recommend them all:
- Shareasale
- ClixGalore
- LinkShare.com (aka LinkSynergy)
One of the largest affiliate advertising networks is Commission Junction, a program we cannot actually recommend due to the very high number of complaints suggesting that the company acts very leniently toward affiliates known to be using scumware to steal credit for clicks from other affiliates. (Of course, scumware has no direct impact on merchant sales and no direct impact on the revenues networks receive: its only direct impact is on the affiliate.)